Over on the Futures of Language website we are advertising a PhD and a postdoc position. If you are interested in fundamental questions at the intersection of language, interaction and technology, have a look. We offer a number of resources:| The Ideophone
Vakbondsleden van de AOb krijgen vandaag een email waarin ze gevraagd worden of ze instemmen met het onderhandelaarsakkoord voor de…| The Ideophone
For Ray Kurzweil, singularity is the point at which machine intelligence would be more powerful than human intelligence.| The Ideophone
Start your blog with an exultant tone, pompous words, and gratuitous alliterations and I know I'm not so much in for an exciting journey to a fascinating world as a rapid descent into the wastelands of utter mediocrity. I recently came across some obvious LLM-generated slop on science blogging aggregator Rogue Scholar. Here I write up why synthetic text has no place in scholarly blogging.| The Ideophone
I had a very weird exchange with Oxford University Press the other day that made me realise how deeply they are implicated in the surveillance capitalism we’ve grown accustomed to from Elsevier and the like. The good news: there are plenty of alternatives. I already favoured open access diamond publishers and have in recent years declined many invitations to contribute to this or that handbook (as my colleagues can attest — sorry, Oxford Handbook of Iconicity editors). I won’t be publis...| The Ideophone
Van eind 2018 tot halverwege 2024 had ik het voorrecht om onderzoeksleider te zijn van het Vidi-project "Elementaire deeltjes van de taal" met een Vidi-talentbeurs van NWO, de Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek. Dit zijn enkele notities uit de eindrapportage.| The Ideophone
GPT based text generators like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot have rapidly become a “cultural sensation”. This document provides scientific background and guidance on how to think critically and mindfully about these tools in academic writing and research.| The Ideophone
I saw a thing fly by on PsyArxiv and must write about it. Warning: snark detected. This is a new paper by Green, Kong, Brysbaert, and Keogh with the following abstract:| The Ideophone
TL;DR: It takes two to tell a story: narrator and audience. Response tokens or continuers like ‘mhmm’ play a key role in making stories work. Two new papers extend the study of continuers across languages and modalities. Work by Lutzenberger et al. reveals the importance of minimal tokens that don’t occupy the main articulators in British Sign Language and Spoken British English. And a study by Börstell showcases a neat methodological replication and extension of the sequential search ...| The Ideophone
For years now I have had a boilerplate rejection notice for review requests from Elsevier journals. (See the Cost of Knowledge pledge for why.) I include it here, feel free to remix and reuse: | The Ideophone
Lab rotations are a regular feature of work in my research groups. Students join the lab and figure out a project they want to work on themselves. While this typically results in at least a serviceable final report and good learning outcomes for the student, occassionally the work done lends itself to wider dissemination. If a student feels motivated and we can support them, we may try to move towards publication. In the past few years we’ve produced several such student-led papers. What we...| The Ideophone
Suppose you hear a word like Korean tuˈgɯndugɯn and two possible meanings ‘heartbeat’ or ‘gentle movement’. Most people pick the first (as we found in 2016). Or suppose you hear that same word and see the meaning ‘heartbeat’ and you’re asked to rate, on a scale of 1 to 5, how well form and meaning fit together. Most people will go high (4.7 on average, as we found).| The Ideophone
Nithikul Mimjulrath’s process of translating a hand-knotted cup into a digital representationKnots are fascinating: they tie together topology, embodied experience, and material culture. As Thai textile artist and designer Nithikul Nimkulrath (2024) has pointed out, knots are the kind of thing we come to know “through and in making”. One of her artworks (see photo) explorers the materiality of knots by translating a physical, hand-knotted container into a 3D render. | The Ideophone
Like anyone active in the space of LLMs and generative AI, I get a growing amount of invitations to speak at conferences and colloquia on something or other LLM-related. A subset of these invites is about the relation between LLMs and academic writing. Recently I had the occasion to respond to such an invite.| The Ideophone
Following on from my post about setting up my kids with a Raspberry Pi 400 as their first computer, here I share how I’ve made the system easy to manage remotely and how I imposed some light parental controls, all while keeping the system open to tinkering. It will be a matter of time until they discover how to break out of it — indeed I see that as part of the challenge of discovery that I hope they’ll take on.| The Ideophone
Our kids (6 and 9) wanted to learn to type, and I think it’s useful for them to become computer literate sooner rather than later, so I spent some time figuring out options. We’ve had tablets around the house for a while, and they’ve benefited from some simple and creative android apps in learning to read and getting a first taste of programming with scratch. But a touch-only interface has its limitations, and tablets are primarily devices for media consumption.| The Ideophone
